Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot and British Modernist poetry
Ezra Pound , 1885-1972 * A controversial persona. Sentenced with high treason after WW II. Was of Anglo-American origin. Lived in Italy. Believed Mussolini was embodiment of Confucius. Believed banks and speculative capitalists were powers of disorder. It led to his anti-Semitism. Was to be executed but eventually was found insane. * Imagism (on a handout). He introduced to English literature. Base of modern poetry. He began to write laconic, austere, colloquial poems in three verses. The individual line was the chief unit of composition. Very fragmentary composition. Juxtaposition of very often disparate images. * Translated Japanese haiku which are connected with often disparate images. * Getting rid of superfluous vocabulary and ornaments. Focus on visual images. Getting rid of romanticism as it became impersonal. His follower T. S. Elliot speaks of extinction of personality of the poet. * Introduces the “persona” – a mask of somebody else. The poet speaks through it. * Led campaign to free English poetry from insularity. Accepted the concept that European culture is a whole, not segmented into national cultures. Offered fresh insights into French and Italian poetry and into Latin classics. * In poetry used diction of everyday speech. Like Eliot used quotation frequently. A poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly comparable to The Waste Land * Since he moved to Italy, he worked on Cantos only. These were not finished at the time of his death. Imagism movement. Founded by a group led by E. Pound in 1912. Published 4 anthologies. The inspiration came from the idea of T. E. Hulme , who was an anti-romantic, believing that words were being used by poets to obscure emotions instead of to clarify them. The kind of poet he had in mind when he made this criticism was the Victorian Algernon Swinburne . * The credo: use the language of common speech, but use it exactly. Create new rhythms for new moods. Allow complete freedom in subject. Present an image, but avoid vagueness. Produce poetry that is hard and clear. Concentration is the essence of poetry. * Anglo-American movement. English periodical The Egoist, started in 1914. Pound separated from the movement in 1914. * Contributors to the anthologies were Lawrence, James Joyce and H. D. * New edition of John Donne’s poetry in 1912, Big influence on Thomas Stearns Eliot ' '''1888-1965 * Poet, critic and dramatist, born in the US but settled in England, associated with modernism. Worked in Loyd’s bank . Edited literal magazines. Director, publisher of poems. * Interested in French Symbolism. Won the Nobel Prize. After WWII the most influential poet and critic in England. The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock first important poem in magazine Poetry published in 1915 in the US. Prufrock and Other Observations , first book 1917 The Waste Land 1922 published. He established The Criterion, a leading personality of English New criticism. He tried to revive the Metaphysical Poets. * In 1927 he demonstrated his conversion to Christianity by becoming a member of the Church of England. Volumes of poetry: ''Ashe Wednesday , Four Quartets '' * Not many works but very important. The poems have no fixed verse form or regular pattern, and rhyme is used only occasionally. * His poetic influences: the French 19th century Symbolists, early 17th cent. dramatists Middleton , Webster , Tourneur , later Shakespeare, the Metaphysical poets. A double influence on his style John Donne, and Dante. A critic – concerned with a reassessment of the past in such a way as to lead up to his own poetic production. The Sacred Wood , early essay, a critic must develop a strong historical sense in order to judge literature. The poet must be impersonal in the creative exercise of the craft. * Experimented with verse drama ''Murder in the Cathedral , The Cocktail Party '' Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats collected for children – turned into musical Cats * Eliot’s non-dramatic poetry and his early criticism have had the effect in this century of reordering an renewing literary taste both in this country and in America. He was not alone, but he was outstanding, in reviving admiration for the Metaphysical poets, and reducing the relative status of the Spenserian and Miltonic strains in the English tradition. His poetry enlarged the range and form of poetic expression as a medium of the modern consciousness. The Hollow Men , poem * at first controversial. In form fragmentary, refereed to G, F, G, L texts – quotations in G and F, emptiness in the culture. * Gloomy, paralyzed, shape without colour, cross – interest in spirituality (Musical Cats). * Third stanza – dry, negative images, to grope together – finding your way in the darkness. * A whimper – a noun, a whim – slaboch, bang-loud – knousat. * Emotional poet, he wrote essays, metaphysical poems. Poetic revolution 1911 – 1922 – The Waste Land * 433 lines divided into five parts. No logical continuity between the parts. Lines vary in length and rhythm and are usually unrhymed. The poem is not written in ‘free verse’. The theme is the decay and fragmentation of Western culture. Conceived in terms of the loss of natural fertility. * It possesses artistic coherence brought about by four closely related methods: 1. use of symbols derived from two anthropologists Weston and Frazer. Their books relate to ancient myths about the alternation of fertility and barrenness. Although study of them undoubtedly helps the reader to understand the poem. It is not entirely necessary. * He intended the symbols to be imaginatively convincing, by their own force, to a sufficiently responsive reader. 2. the juxtaposition of passages with contrasting rhythms, diction, and imagery to accomplish ‘a music of ideas ... Arranged not that they must tell us something, but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude. 3. The use of past history in contrast to the present time, as a means of demonstrating the peculiarities of the present. This method is paralleled by James Joyce in Ulysses and Ezra Pound in his Cantos. 4. The use of literary quotation and parody in order to bring out the contrasts of past and present states of culture. At least 35 writers are quoted or parodied in The Waste Land. * Hope in the wasteland symbolized by rain. It shows the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. There are many symbolic associations with legendary and historical events. It contains allusions to many different literary sources by many authors. G. M. Hopkins , Victorian poet, published 1918, experimental poetry. W. B. Yeats , 1865-1939 * Anglo-Irish poet of Protestant family, a fact of importance in 19th century Ireland where nationalism was so bound up wit Roman Catholicism. * Poet and playwright, influenced European poetry – French symbolism. Involved in the Irish revival. Founded theatre in Dublin. National revival connected with political revival. * Boem about Easter 1916. * blunk gaze = anticipated fashism * Became a senator, interested in strange spiritual matters, creates his own symbols. * Father was an eminent painter. Went to school in London and county of Sligo which is background to much of his poetry. * He shared the antagonism felt by English writers of Pre-Raphaelite background, to the urban and industrial harshness and materialism of contemporary English culture. * Sought a basis for resistance to it in Irish peasant folk traditions and ancient Celtic myth. * First work was on a theme from this mythology. The Wanderings of Oisin * anti-materialist poetry, career in four phases: the 1890s- the leading member of the Aesthetic Movement in London. Outcome of Pre-Raphaelitism. Indebted to the Oxford scholar Walter Pater. Revolt against Victorian materialism. Tended to Catholicism and to mysticism. * work of this period: prose ''The Celtic Twilight , The Secret Rose , The Tables of the Law , verse The Rose , The Wind Among the Reeds '' the 20th century - built up the Irish National Theatre in Dublin. Was manager there. Wrote plays based on Irish myth. He hoped to make the theatre the voice of a distinctively Irish modern culture. He created one of the most interesting dramatic movements in contemporary Europe. * Only volume of verse In the Seven Woods * Plays ''Cathleen in Houlihan , The King’s Threshold , Deirdre '' In this era, his poetry began to change. He was influenced by the Imagists, period of Transition. Had been interested in mysticism. Now became one of the poets drawn to the intellectually more vigorous tradition associated with the 17th century Metaphysicals, esp. Donne (as Pound, Eliot did). He was no longer a romantic, he turned away from Ireland. * Books The Green Helmet , Responsibilities After 1918, he found a set on interlocking symbols and he integrated them into his poetic ideas. He grew into one of the most important poets of the 20th century. =The Wind Swans at Coole , Michael Robartes and the Dancer , The Tower , The Winding Stair= * Strong rhythms, stanza and rhyme patterns, range of symbols each of which is a nucleus of meanings. His symbols were explained in the ''prose A Vision .'' Had a wide mythology of persons. Some drawn form his own friends. Some from history and myth. Some invented. It discusses the eternal opposites of objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body. Theses are the basis of his philosophy.' =A Full Moon in March , Last Poems= Purgatory play Per Amica Silentia Lunae , Plays and Controversies '' critical essays The Second Coming - The name is an allusion to the second coming of Christ after his crucifixion. - His second coming will be preceded by disastrous violence and destruction. - In this poem, it is not Jesus who returns, but some other incomprehensible, alien divinity. - He had a vision, so he knows about the coming of this new god. - The god has been asleep for the past two thousand years, waiting to be reborn. - He is still unsure about the meaning of the vision. - The first eight lines describe the anarchy in the world. - The remaining lines describe his vision of “a shape with lion body and the head of a man” - The poem ends with a question asking who it is coming to Bethlehem. '20TH CENTURY BRITISH POETRY' The two most remarkable poets of the 1st half of the 20th century are William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. They combined tradition and experiment in their work. Georgian poetry * Reaction against Victorianism. They dominated the scene in the beginning of the 20th century. * Represented by five verse anthologies published between 1912 and 1922. Called Georgian according to George V. to imply a new start for English poetry. Involved a degree of experiment and freshness of approach to the art. They defended old traditions, colonialism and provincialism, and the spirit of “Englishness.” * Rupert Brooke , W.H. Davies , D. H. Lawrence , John Masefield , Robert Graves , Alfred Edward Housman , Siegfried Sassoon * Contemporary to Georgian poets are Yeats, Pound and Eliot. They are more original and more substantial. * Since 1950 there has been some revival of interest in it. It was lyrical, colloquial, with emancipated form. Some of the dead poetic convention left over form the decadent Romanticism of the previous century, but it lacked the strength and boldness of thought which marked the work of Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Robert Bridges * a very sophisticated poet The Testament of Beauty - a philosophical poem in free verse. Rudyard Kipling * Celebrated colonialism, the courage of the British Army and other traditional values. * He used simple words, colloquial expressions, and natural rhythm. Departmental Ditties * Satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British India. Something of Myself - An unfinished account of his unhappy childhood in an English home. '''Lawrence’s Poetry' * Great poet, in general modernist novelist, subjective narrator. Very controversial author, wanted to be free of the weight of formalism. Master of short stories, but mainly a poet of life and being. He wrote one book depicting his whole life in various forms. * Realist and visionarie, prophet, nature mystician, his poetic principle is of romantic origin which is close to Wordsworth’s meditative lyrics, close to Blake’s defence of human’s nature and spontaneous being. * In all Lawrence’s novels, short stories, poems and essays his basic question appears: how to be? how to be alive? how to be yourself? * His mother brought up her children in extremely puritan way to hate the sin. He was gradually trying to get out of her influence and become a “religious agnostic.” * He found impulses in French and Russian literature, especially Dostojevskij, Tolstij, Balzac and Flaubert and in Cezanne’s writing. * He didn’t have much chance in the time of T. S. Eliot. He considered Lawrence a heretic. For him Lawrence was a rebel who is driven by his inner world only and didn’t want to obey any tradition or institution. The very substance of his nature denied Eliot’s concept of poetic language. * The interest in Lawrence grew in the 50s and 60s. Lawrence is read much more today then ever in his life. His poems are purely intuitional. According to him, we have to remove the wrong, inorganic bounds, especially the bond to money and set the new organic bond to space, sun and earth, with people, nation and family. He doesn’t speak to people who want to conquer the world but to those who want to live in it. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1964 - More than a thousand pages. Love poems and Others , 1913 Look! We Have Come Through! , 1917 Birds, Beasts and Flowers , 1923 Cypresses * It is about Etruscans . They were a tribe in the 6th century BC. They proclaimed the philosophy of life (dancing, beauty). The poem asks why they were killed by the Romans, why they thought them vicious. * With burying extinct races, we have buried “so much of the delicate magic of life”. There is only one evil - to deny life as the Romans denied the life of Etruria. * He says Etruscans survive in the monumental cypresses. Pansies , 1929, Nettles, 1930, More Pansies , 1930, Last Poems, 1932 The Uprooted * From More Pansies. * About loneliness, about being uprooted and losing connection with the cosmos. People who complain of loneliness cannot take root in the presence of other people. They have to put forth new roots into the unknown, slowly and painfully in solitude. It is organistic, it proclaims harmony with nature. Criticizes abstract idealistic philosophies. It follows Nietzche’s philosophy of life.